Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is funny. That is the Acting Chairman's opinion but in my opinion I am speaking on the Bill. I am talking about the FEMPI cuts being reversed. One would think we were in a honeymoon period again, but we are not. More important, the people do not believe we are either. The Government is in a state of indecision over when to cut and run and have the election. When people get their pay packets in January, they will know what they have and what they got.

The troika did not deal with the massive, exorbitant waste at the top, the consultants, Uisce Éireann and all the other bodies. It is as if we did not have enough experience of the monstrosity of the HSE which was created by amalgamating the health boards through centralisation. We set up Irish Water and a bonus culture was built into it. We paid consultants €90 million to design it. It is a merry game of fat cats rubbing butter into fat cats' you-know-where to make them fatter and more prosperous. Four kids from kindergarten would not have designed Irish Water any worse than what they have done. The organisation has a bonus culture. The Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, said there would not be a penny paid in bonuses while he was in charge but he had to crawl away from this again. This is another battle he lost because the machinery of State decided the staff would have to get their bonuses, even if they were not earned.

I am not talking about ordinary public servants or front-line staff and their commitment over the years. I am not referring to HSE front-line nurses, community nurses, doctors, caterers, county council workers and ordinary people who have to deliver the services with less and less resources. Senior people get all the money. Former Minister Brian Lenihan introduced a cut for the senior civil servants. When I challenged him, he was told there were only 186 people affected. I tabled a motion at the time — I was in the Fianna Fáil Party — and the Minister thanked me for it. When he went to research it, he found out there were almost 1,000 affected. Is that not trickery and hoodwinking? The cut was reversed and those concerned got out under the wire. Everybody else had to take the medicine. This was at the beginning of the FEMPI arrangement. The staff in question got it reversed because they are in the cars and offices with the Ministers and have their hands on the handlebars of power and will not take them off them. Successive Governments have backed off from dealing with this.

I listened to Deputy Lucinda Creighton attentively. She was correct that those in the current Government were railing against these issues when I sat on the other side of the House. I was railing against them when I was a member of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party because I knew it could not last. Now the Government is all for what is happening just to buy an election. I am surprised by the backbenchers, especially the few self-employed ones, who should understand the madness of engaging in auction politics to get back into power, especially since we are still borrowing massively to run the show every day of the week and to meet the cost of current spending.

The outdoor staff and front-line staff I mentioned, the ambulance drivers and members of An Garda Síochána were reduced to enslavement because of the cuts to their wages. Now we are recruiting gardaí, which I am delighted to see, but we are not paying them half the money - they cannot live on it. Where are we going to get the morale and the respect among low-level gardaí, low-level teachers and those at other levels? We have to have a level playing field and we must respect, honour and praise work. Any man who goes to work must be rewarded always. We must look after people who are genuinely unemployed and genuinely sick as well.

The cuts imposed on the disabled and marginalised under FEMPI have been merciless. Again, these are the people who will gain least from the budget. The higher earners will benefit from the higher tax cuts and the lower earners and unemployed will get less. The pensioners are to get €3 a week; that is a lot of good to them.

Take general practitioners: I am not a spokesperson for them but they are at the coalface. They have a contract that is 40 years old but the Government refuses to renegotiate it so it will be relevant to the work they are expected to do. The general practitioners swear the Hippocratic oath to help and save people and treat the sick. Especially in rural areas but also in urban areas, the vast majority are self-employed. They answer calls at all times of the night and day. They employ other doctors, nurses and psychiatrists, the lot. They are businesspeople and may have 20 people working for them. They have been cut. The figures, which are accurate, show general practitioners have been forced to let staff go. A spokesperson for the National Association of General Practitioners has warned that the walls are caving in on family doctors, yet the Government engages in folly in respect of children under six. It is another folly project of the last Minister. Someone else got contaminated with it this time — I do not use that word in any bad way — with regard to the provision of free general practitioner care for children of 11 and under. They are the healthiest people in our society. Day in day out, Deputy Kelleher, the Minister of State, Deputy Joe McHugh, and I encounter people who are sick and in need, awaiting operations in pain and agony and on trolleys, yet their medical cards are removed unceremoniously from them. The HSE system that I deal with is so bureaucratic. Those people have experienced savage cuts. A survey of 72% of general practitioners' practices, carried out by the National Association of General Practitioners, found that as many as 8% of general practitioners have to close up and go.

They will not even be negotiated with in terms of a decent contract. It is not right. Self-employed people will drive the economy. They were driving it until the Construction Industry Federation and others got involved in collective bargaining and negotiated rates for themselves. It was all about the big people. We forgot about the little people and the small farmer, who is still struggling and who got less from the budget than anybody else. We forgot about the small and medium enterprises, SMEs, which each employ between one and 20 people. If all the SMEs employed one extra person, no one would be unemployed. We know that but we have strangled them with quango after quango. The mother of all quangos is Irish Water, whose employees cannot fix a washer in a tap. They have no employees who are capable of doing anything. It is all consultants and agents, who are good people, but anything that has to be done must be done by local authorities. Now we cannot phone the local authorities. If somebody has a problem, he or she must phone Irish Water first. We have layers of red tape to reward retired county and city managers, senior officials and some Deputies here whose wives retired from other public service jobs and were pushed into Irish Water. It is disgusting and disgraceful.

We were led a merry dance by the troika. Shame on the troika for not getting into the veins of rural Ireland - and urban Ireland also - to see what was really going on and how the people were being affected by the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest, FEMPI, Act. We are now back to FEMPI. It is like Hallowe'en, when children play trick-o-the-loop or trick or treat. It is a case of "Come out Enda and give us a treat". He will get some treat when he goes back to Castlebar, where the only business park in the town closed down. The position is the same in every other town and village. Business has become too costly because we have appointed quango after quango.

The name of the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, should be changed to the "national employers' supports agency". People with briefcases are calling to self-employed people and harassing them by telling them their daughter or son should not be working in a premises after 9 p.m. on a Saturday or Sunday and so on. I am all for workers' rights - I have been an employer for the past 32 years - but we do not need these people marching in and flashing their identification cards. We have inspectors, all of whom are on expenses, going around the country persecuting people when they should be supporting them, particularly in a time of recession, and allowing them to breathe. They should work with those to whom I refer and try to understand the problems and the issues they face and assist them in dealing with them. They should not create bureaucratic messes.

What cuts were introduced through FEMPI for senior officers in the courts and the sheriffs who act for the courts? Scandalously, they were allowed to go around and evict people and make fortunes in the process. In certain cases, the senior court clerk and the receiver were one and the same person. It is disgusting. It is corrupt, and I hate using that word. Ordinary people-----

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